


The Heart-Marrow

by theonetryingtolive



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Fluff, Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:20:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24698206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theonetryingtolive/pseuds/theonetryingtolive
Summary: “It is not the beauty of your body,The beauty shaped in your face,The beauty blinding my eyesThough it had gone beyond thought;But the beauty of the spiritThat took form in your face,The beauty of the spirit,The heart-marrow of my love.” Sorely MacLean
Relationships: Ronald Speirs/Reader
Kudos: 3





	The Heart-Marrow

He hadn’t spoken Gaelic in what felt like forever. That language was restricted to his moments of solitude, when he spoke on the phone with the grieving mother, or when he thought of the absent father who never once deigned to speak to him in English while at home.

There had always been a measure of desperation in the way Ronald Speirs moved through life. Whether this desperation stemmed from the feelings of displacement he experienced in his everyday life or from somewhere else, it was hard to tell. There had always been a lion inside him, holding back the wilderness that attempted to escape whenever he wasn’t looking.

Long ago, when he had still been a child, he’d fallen down a steep, rocky hill. As he lay on his side, he looked at Arthur’s Seat, and wondered. In tangled Gaelic he had wondered if his intangible wilderness would eventually swallow him whole. The doctors diagnosed a concussion. Cradled on the lap of his mother, he couldn’t stop thinking of the lion, or the wolf, or the bear roaring in him. Would they make a sacrifice of him?

When the war came, he didn’t hesitate. His mother had looked pained, his father proud. Ron had donned the uniform because it was the only logical continuation of his life. He had never been meant to do something different. There was the roaring inside him, the Gaelic tangled in his hair, and the ever present desperation in every step he took towards the front.

After the first jump it became clear. He was not a sacrificial lamb to the wild thing inside him. He was not the broken body at the bottom of the hill. He was not the rosy cheeked boy his mother still pictured on the phone. He didn’t know what it was, the raging desperation grew every time he pulled the trigger. The ruthlessness in his demeanour was mirrored by the decaying world around him.

Then, of course, came the flickering light. He saw you with the same curiosity he approached every new thing in life, and when you smiled for the first time, he realised you were smiling not only at him, but also at the wild.

The first time you kissed he had whispered words in Gaelic, without noticing, and without caring. You’d attempted to whisper them back, and his face lit up like it never had before. Pressing kisses to your lips he had repeated the words. Each syllable got a kiss, each inflection of the words made him pull you closer until there was not an inch of space between you.

You exchanged glances from across rooms, across battlefields, and he would always mouth those same words. A message just for you.

You didn’t find out what those words meant until much later, until the war was over and you realised the wild in his eyes was not going away, that it would always be a permanent fixture in him.

All those years he had been saying the simplest of things, and yet the one that weighted more than any other thing in the whole world.

His wedding vows included words by Sorely MacLean, whispered in the quiet church in their original Gaelic, and then translated for you to understand. When you said ‘I do’ the roaring inside him turned into a howl of triumph. He loved you, in the way only wilderness can love. And you loved him too, in the only way one can love Ronald Speirs.


End file.
